AbstractReferencing current research in neuroscience, this article argues that although knowledge about logic and evidence are important for helping students become critical thinkers, teachers should devote attention to the nonrational biases currently being evoked for persuasion, plan additional class time for students to reflect on their own emotional biases, and encourage students to self-identify as critical thinkers, so that they will continue to think critically in other courses and contexts. To attain this goal, approaches involving performance and reflection should be given further attention to help students develop the habit of questioning the credibility of information.

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

In an Internet posting a few years ago, a former writing teacher, having abandoned the academic life in order to raise Arabian horses, observed that the process of teaching college writing was similar in many ways to the enterprise of "dressage," a term that refers to the guiding of a horse through a series of complex maneuvers by slight movements of the hands, legs, and weight. In particular, he noted the following:

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It is a pleasant weekday morning, and you are on your way to your office in the writing center. But as you approach the main entrance of the center, you encounter crowds of students congregated in the hallway, all of them attempting to get in. There is a sense of nervous anxiety, even desperation in the air, and students are talking about what number they are. Somehow, you manage to push past the group, and as you enter the writing center, you encounter another crowd of students, equally distraught, clustered around the front desk, some begging and pleading, others looking grim. The phone is ringing off the hook, every available seat is taken, tutors' eyes are glazed, and the receptionist looks as if she is about to freak out. Between phone calls, she manages to mumble that this week the writing center has turned away over one hundred students a day. This is the scene which occurred in the writing center during the midpoint and final weeks of the Fall 1990 semester at the University of Southern California, when the Freshman Writing Program instituted a system of portfolio grading in place of a holistically scored departmental examination. It is a scene which called attention not only to the effect of portfolio grading on the writing center but also to several pedagogical and ethical issues associated with writing center assistance. Before I discuss these issues, however, I would like to establish that, despite the chaotic scene I described, our program is quite enthusiastic about portfolio evaluation, has